Most people may not have heard about the influence of Oracle in the Linux community. If you’re not aware, Oracle ranks among the top fifteen all-time and top ten contributors in every Linux kernel version.
Not only that, but Oracle also holds the title of building the world’s first autonomous OS, Oracle Linux, which features the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK). Hence, Oracle always integrates UEK with upstream Linux kernel to provide high stability and performance. In addition to the regular changes, Oracle has announced new update 3 for the current UEK release 5.
Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 5 Update 3
The latest Oracle kernel of series 5 is based on the mainline Linux kernel version 4.14.35. It includes various new features, improvements, and security bug fixes to optimize the power of the Oracle cloud infrastructure.
UEK R5 update 3 also includes various refinements in a number of device drivers. As a result, Oracle Linux featuring kernel update 3 now provides better support on embedded ARM64 platforms.
Here is a list of some other notable feature updates:
- On-Demand Paging
- File system and storage fixes
- XFS deadlock bug fix
- POSIX lock leakages and system crash fixes
- Hardware incompatibility with QEMU bugfix
For more details, you can also read the official release notes here.
Moving forward, the core feature of a kernel is security. Update 3 resolves various security vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). To name a few, unauthorized reading of RDS message from kernel stack, information disclosure due to insufficient control flow, and dereferencing of a NULL pointer. The full list of CVEs is long, but you can read it from here.
At last, Oracle Linux has also submitted a patch to stop the ext4 file system corruption. This patch is still under review, so you’ve to avoid the frequent and repeated system shutdowns that corrupt the file system.
